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Cutting Electricity Costs in Miami-Dade County, Florida

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Miami-Dade County, Florida will be piping methane gas from their regional landfill to the adjacent wastewater plant to generate a significant portion of the massive facility's future electricity needs.

Thank you for coming to celebrate a milestone in Miami-Dade. We are going to be turning biogas into energy. In Miami-Dade County, we’ve been a leader in the whole sustainability effort. I met with our sustainability director yesterday and we laid out a very ambitious plan that covers every spectrum.

And the biggest two areas are water and electricity. And what this grant allows us to do is to take gases and turn them into electricity. So it’s huge.

Miami-Dade is a great example because it’s a terrific example of a twofer, where you’re taking a waste product and turning it into usable energy and it’s supporting infrastructure that the city needs.

Presently, our electric bill is about $100,000 a month and 20,000 (dollars) of that is being cogenerated. In the future, our electric bill is going to be 200,000 (dollars) a month and $60,000 of that will be cogeneration. So it is to definite improvement.

And there’s also the byproduct of that: The heat that we’re going to be producing will be utilized not only to heat the digests but also to dry some of our sludge. We dry it out and we produce a composting material that we’re selling to the farmers through Central Florida and even in Dade County. So there’s a lot involved in it than just producing electricity.

We’ve done our estimates and we’re assuming that it’s going to create anywhere from 20 to 25 new jobs for this project. It’s definitely going to help. It’s going to be a huge impact.

There’s going to be some labor work; there’s going to be some technical work. The design work, actually, is already done; the permitting is happening right now and actual construction is going to start soon. So that’s work for people in this community.

We’re taking the gas out of the landfill, which we need to do. And it means that there’s an alternative type of fuel that’s going to be used so we’re not going to be relying on fossil fuels. And that’s good for everything.